This idea has been floating around my mind for years now, I guess its time to try do somthing.

Many people may be aware of the Takeru vending machines that were in Japan in the 80's and 90's, they sold pc game software (pc88/98/msx/x68 etc) and featured a combination of both commercial games and doujin games. Because these games were merely copied onto a generic disk you receive from the machine and not boxed games available in stores, a lot of the games aren't dumped and remain lost.

Seraph Sefil Afrei no Kioku (セラフ～セフィル・アフレイの記憶) was an action RPG released by MNM Software in 1994 for the PC98 exclusive to the Takeru machines. There are no screenshots or any sort of info of it at all online, but MNM software has previously released the side scrolling action RPG Algarna for the X1 and later X68000.

The reason I bring this game up specifically out of all the undumped Takeru games is because perhaps there might be a chance to save it. The founder of MNM software Mikito Ichikawa (AKA Mick Albert) is a big pinball enthusiast and is still active online with his website.

So I think it would really be worthwhile to email him asking if he possibly has any backups of Seraph that he can share with us? I came close to emailing him many times with my broken Japanese, but I think if a member here fluent in Japanese can prepare a short paragraph that would be much more effective.

If anyone is interested in this at all let me know what you think. If there aren't any fluent Japanese speakers here then I'll still try contact Mick Albert and see what I can do.

It seems he would hopefully be pretty open to talk to then, I'm sure he'll find it pretty crazy that people would be trying to play one of his companies old games.

Seraph is strange though because there is absolutely no info about it online (due to it being a Takeru exclusive release) but all of M.N.M's other games are relatively well known due to many of them having Yuzo Koshiro soundtracks.

*Edit: Another thing I noticed - In that interview Albert mentions that at one point he became seriously ill and had to close the M.N.M offices in 1993, and he didn't reopen them until 1995. Seraph was released in January 1994... Maybe some remaining M.N.M employees finished off the game and just released it through Takeru due to Albert putting the company on hold while he was sick?

Apparently, the game was not officially released by NMN. What happened was that he and an outside person was working on the game. He became sick and since the other person was under 20, the contract was void. So that person took the game to Takeru. Then Takeru released it with "Last game from NMN."

So basically, he doesn't have a copy. This may become the white whale for PC98...

Wow, this whole thing is fascinating (and rather sad). So these machines were a bit like the FDS Kiosks, which could save games for you to disk? It's bloody tagic if we've lost of some of the software.

Is there a comprehensive list of Takeru releases somewhere?

Also, if you'd like me to make an HG101 blog entry on it, I can. Or would you prefer it be kept within this forum for the time being?

Thanks for the news Radical R. You fluent in Japanese? I never got a response to the email I sent him, but thats no problem, even if he did happen to have the game its not like he should be expected to share it unless he fully wants to. The main idea of this thread was just to get the story out there, and if we were lucky then maybe something could be dug up, and thanks to takataka we at least now have screenshots of the game.

Sketcz: Yeah they were like floppy disk vending machines. There are no complete lists of Takeru stuff because the amount of titles would be massive, but its important to note that Takeru games essentially came in 3 categories:

- Budget 'digital' releases of games previously sold in boxes- Original games by commercial software companies only distributed through Takeru- Doujin games

Obviously Seraph falls into the second category. There aren't very many games in this category, but the other big one that I know about is 影忍伝 (Kageninden) by Cosmos Computer. I have old issues of Login magazine that show the game, and its super cool looking action RPG with a similar graphical style to Xak 3.

As for the doujin games, there are hundreds of them that got distributed through Takeru, all of them of varying quality and varying price (the very small/rough games obviously were much cheaper than the elaborate games). There is one of the more expensive/elaborate doujin releases through Takeru which is one of the pc98 games I want to track down the most, but I'll talk about that in another thread similar to the purpose of this one once I can be bothered to make it.

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